The present invention relates in preferred embodiments to callcenters in the art of telephony systems. Call centers are typically hosted by a company or organization for purposes of providing a service to clients, such as technical assistance or catalogue sales and the like. In a typical call center agents are employed at agent stations having at least one telephone, and in many cases other equipment, such as a personal computer with a video display unit (PC/VDU).
Modern call centers typically have call-switching equipment for directing incoming calls to telephones at agent stations, and computer integration with the switching equipment is now common. This technique is known in the art as computer telephony integration (CTI). In a CTI system a processor is connected to the switching equipment by a CTI link, and the processor runs CTI applications controlling the switch. PC/VDUs at agent stations may be interconnected on a local area network (LAN) also connected to the CTI processor.
Development of CTI call centers has made it possible for agents to interact with callers (clients) in more ways than just by telephone. In a suitably equipped call center, agents can operate with E-mail, Video mail, Video calls, and Internet Protocol Network Telephony (IPNT) calls as well as plain old telephony service (POTS) calls. Further to the above, such a modern call center may also be linked to other call centers, data bases, and the like in a variety of ways, such as by local area networks (LAN), wide area networks (WAN), including the World Wide Web (WWW), and various other types of linked-computer networks, such as wireless, satellite based, etc.
Call centers are organized to receive and distribute incoming calls to a plurality of agents at the call center. There may be a large volume of incoming calls and a large number of agents. As described above, calls are not limited to POTS calls, but may include communications of many other sorts. Call routing to and within call centers involves processors and software dedicated to directing calls to appropriate agents for processing and response.
Routing of calls, then, may be on several levels. Pre-routing may be done at Service Control Points (SCPs) or other network access points at the network level and further routing may be, and generally is, accomplished at individual call centers.
To distribute incoming calls to agents in a call center, the distribution system has to have some criteria for distribution. Most commonly there is capability for the distribution system to track which phones are on hook or off hook, so the system may monitor which agents are busy on calls or not busy. In the simplest system, then, calls are distributed on a first-in-first-out basis to available agents.
It has occurred to the inventors that a desirable goal relating to call center communication is to have agents busy on high priority calls rather than spending a lot of time covering calls of a lesser importance. For example, a high priority call may be a sales order call wherein the caller is purchasing a product or service over the telephone. A lesser priority call may be a caller who is just curious about the product or service and has a few questions to ask the agent. It would be desirable as well to be able to transfer a higher priority call to be taken by an agent who is currently engaged with a lower priority call, without having to lose the original call.
In a typical first in first out (FIFO) queue situation, the fist call in is the first call out regardless of importance of the call, and there is typically no facility for prioritizing calls. What is clearly needed is a priority determination method and control routines that will enable determination and assignment of priority to a call, and based on call priority, agent availability and skill-set, route that call to the best-matched next available agent. Availability in such a system could be adjusted according to priority of any call which an agent may be processing. Additionally, calls bumped could be requeued.